Tribal Students are still unaware to avail XLRI course on entrepreneurship.

Jamshedpur, May 27, 2014

Three years have passed since the launch of the ambitious entrepreneurship development module at XLRI School of Business and Human Resources to promote first generation entrepreneurial talents of the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) community. Despite the best efforts of the business cradle, the response to the course has been unimpressive so far.

"The institute had made special arrangements to attract ST and SC students in a bid to encourage them to become first-generation entrepreneurs. But we have failed to find even three students from each of the respective communities so far," said Prabal K Sen, chairperson, EDC.

The B-school has approached the state government and a few voluntary groups to help spread word about the benefits of the Entrepreneurship Development Centre (EDC) course to the weaker sections of society with special emphasis on SC and ST communities.

In the 60 seats module, 50% of the seats are reserved for local students. The response of general and OBC category students is encouraging, but the response of students from the ST and SCcategory has been far from encouraging. "Lack of awareness about the ongoing entrepreneurship course and difficulty in arranging capital for pursing the programme have been identified as the main reasons behind the poor response of the target communities)," explained Sen.

In a bid to enlighten the prospective EDC students, particularly SC/ST candidates who cannot avail of bank loans, the cradle has announced to further strengthen the course on banking policy for the 2014 EDC
batch.

"Students will be familiarized with the latest policy framework available with banks, including the Credit Guarantee Trust Fund for Micro and Small Enterprises and such other initiatives, which envisage extension of collateral-free loans by banks to small entrepreneurs. We want students face banks with confidence so as to avail financial support from the latter without hassles," said Sen.

He also said that without holistic approach, which involves greater engagement of the state monitoring agencies, strength of the ST/SC students in the EDC course shall not increase.

The curriculum at XLRI has constantly evolved in line with industry needs in particular and the economy at large whilst striving to shape management education by giving due importance in curricula to ethical and socially responsible aspects of management.

In addition to its portfolio of full-time, Flagship Management programs in Business Management, Human Resource Management and General Management, XLRI also offers programs for varied segments of students by way of part-time and virtual interactive learning.

Students are encouraged to apply theoretical learning viz; case studies, research methodologies, frameworks etc., to solve real-life management challenges facing private, public and non-profit sectors of the economy.
Various courses of the institution can be viewed in
http://www.xlri.ac.in/default.aspx.